Wouldn't it be nice if the Gay and Lesbian Mardis Gras was about celebrating diversity and no longer also to fight for equality and respect?

It's the gay and lesbian mardi gras tonight.

Walking through the city there were people in costumes getting ready. Gays, lesbians, transgender, friends, supporters, and people just looking to party.

This year will be the first time the armed forces march, which is kind of nice. Bigotry and inequality still exist. The latter is something that could be changed easily in law. The former attitudes may not be that easy to change. At the very least it would be nice if people could have a live and let live attitude even if people don't feel comfortable with homosexuality.

For me, I look at being gay as a bit like being left handed or having green eyes. It's a minority trait, but natural. To be more precise there may be a continuum with some people very strongly same sex attracted and others less so. But the continuum is natural variation.

Others guided by old religious views or their own upbringing, cultural and conscience disagree.

Do you think the day will come when gay people have equality under the law and these sort of events will be just a celebration rather than have a political motive? Or do you think there will be political or social issues that will need to be highlighted for the forseeable future.

Is gay marriage (and divorce) inevitable?

Wouldn't it be nice if being gay was universally accepted as part of the natural diversity of human society? A non issue. So that people aren't even labelled first as being gay and second as whatever they do - your an artist or policeman that just happens to be gay, not a gay policeman.

Closing Statement from Obey No1kinobe

Mar 2 2013:
That day is on its way. I feel it in my bones. In the USA, your (and my) view of homosexuality is finally a (slim) majority - but how far the US has come in a very little time (less than a decade). Apparently all of the religious rancor and hate has caused people to think about the problem, and it has worked against the religious organizations who attempt to fuel hate.

Mar 4 2013:
Ironically, the day we’re looking forward to is a day when there is no such thing as a Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. I worry sometimes that the LGBT community goes too far. It’s dangerous to assert your personal identity as an LGBT – dangerous legally and for your social life; it’s much easier to stand together with a community.
But isn’t the LGBT “community” little more than a group of people who don’t necessarily have anything in common except being LGBT? In a perfect world, it should be. I am straight, and I have very little in common with the larger percentage of straight people. That’s what diversity means, after all.
When I said the LGBT community sometimes goes too far, what I meant is that in order to form a successful socio-political movement, it was thought by some of the movers and shakers that LGBT needed to be more than just LGBT. It needed to be pro-environment. It needed to be pro-choice. It needed to be politically and religiously liberal. Basically, some LGBTs have accidentally put all LGBTs in an even tighter box – and hosting an independent Mardi Gras celebration seems to me less like a push for equality and more like a solidification of difference. Even though I know the stereotypes are wrong, when I think of a gay person, I still think of someone who is ultra-liberal and very outspoken about it --not simply someone who is gay (as some of you reading this post probably conjured negative assumptions when I said I was straight – as though what I had to say on this issue was less meaningful?).
In a perfect world, there would be no need for a Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, because everyone would be able to acknowledge that LGBTs are just people. There would be no need for anyone to visibly, publicly create a “community” identity because we would all be one community.

(I hope that made sense. In all honesty, if you found what I said offensive, you weren’t reading it very carefully.)

Mar 3 2013:
Being an older lesbian (68), I have seen many changes that I thought I'd never see in USA. It warms my heart that things are starting to really change. I well remember what I went through in the late 50s & 60s, it left many emotional scars, including ending my military career. Will I live to see totally equality? No! Too many groups out there still haven't gotten all theirs yet. Blacks, women, etc.etc.
But the day will come and hopefully before global warming snuffs us all out.

Mar 3 2013:
Hi Obey.
In my circle of friends I have but one lesbian couple & one homosexual couple. Like me, they are getting long in the tooth. Both couples are fully integrated into society, & their sexuality is a non-subject; just as the heterosexuality of the rest of us provokes little comment.
The gay movement is pretty much non-existant here, but appears to be a marketing exercise more than anything else. It promotes it's particular brand of sexuality as somehow superior. This is so far removed from 'live & let live' that it is bound to attract opposition. We are free under the law to decide for ourselves how we want to live. I suggest we just get on with it & leave others to do the same.

Mar 3 2013:
i remember a quote in a biography about David Bowie where it was pointed out that before labels (good old mainstream media and their lazy journalism of convenience and sensationalism), people were whatever and no-one really gave a fuck.

Mar 2 2013:
I don't know enough about Australia or about other countries to know how the acceptance of homosexuality has increased there over time, but there has certainly been great change in the United States over my lifetime.

There are few categories of people that are universally accepted and always some people who would rather cling to beliefs about "the other" than explore counterviews and embrace evidence. So universal acceptance may not happen anytime soon.

That said, the first of the TED2013 talks on the last morning, given by a scholar from New Zealand, examined the increase in human intelligence over time and particularly in the last century. He finds that, thanks to changes over that period from what is expected in schooling, from the emphasis on the rote at the beginning of the century to the increasingly abstract (in particular wrestling with hypotheticals), people have gotten to be far more analytical in ways that should have a definite bearing on your question.

He applied his findings in part of his talk to the evolution away from racial biases.

I didn't hear the whole talk, as I had to go to work, but when it gets put up, I will either flag it to you or start a thread about the implications over time for how people will come to view those that were formerly viewed as "the other."

Mar 2 2013:
For some people in Amerika (and elsewhere too),
All the most wonderful beasts of the earth were here solely for them to hunt and kill, mount on their walls, skin and lay on their floors, or stand to be used as an end table.

That is precisely how I see those who are so hateful towards others, as though that is what they were put here on earth for:
for them to hate, persecute, ridicule, judge, condemn, hunt, incarcerate, lynch, enslave, demonize, shame, force reprogramming on them, spread crazy-making message and abuse them with mental, physical and emotional torture and even kill.

That is what the Insane Moral Majority is. Imagine being a person who sees other people in that way and treats them so?
I only call them Insane, because people who act like that, demonstrate insanity.

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